When Everybody Zigs, It's Time To Zag.


A lot of people in the marketing and advertising world have been getting very excited about this one-off Guardian newspaper advertisement palying on Marmite's "Love it or Hate it" tagline.

Yes, it's nicely designed, but it's a nicely designed rendition of an old thought and a thought that had been everywhere in the days before this image appeared.

And while we know that individual ads don't shift the sales of newspapers, my other problem with it is that the last thing that would have made a newspaper appear distinctive this weekend was another analysis of Baroness Thatcher.

Far better to have focussed on promoting something completely different or (as Rob Campbell suggested to me) an ad guaranteeing there was no coverage of Thatcher in the issue.

As Kit Kat prove by linking their "Take a Break" trope to the concept of a No Wi_FI zone, distinctiveness can lie in doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

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